


Broken People Are So Beautiful—They Need Each Other Job

by crayonbreakygal



Category: Leverage
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-14
Updated: 2016-06-14
Packaged: 2018-07-15 00:21:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7197515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crayonbreakygal/pseuds/crayonbreakygal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Broken people are so beautiful.  They have to put themselves back together every day.  Takes place anytime after the beginning of season three.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Broken People Are So Beautiful—They Need Each Other Job

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, I'm breaking some grammatical rules in this fic because I'm using present tense, unless I have the character think back to the past! Hardest to write in my book. Maybe it's not actually breaking the rule then. So if you ever see me break grammatical rules, know that I do know the rules. One of my professors once said that if you know the rule, then you can break it, if you have good reason. So, when I use a fragmented sentence, believe me, I know that I am. Enjoy!

Takes place anywhere after the beginning of season three.

Broken People Are So Beautiful—They Need Each Other Job

Broken people are so beautiful.  They have to put themselves back together every day.—Robert Tew

Hardison starts every day with the internet.  He searches and searches to make sure everything is right in their world.  And by their world, he means that their covers are not blown, that no one is coming after them, that any kind of law enforcement is not tracking them.  He protects them from being broken any more.  See, his team, all of them, are more broken than he had realized when he joined them. 

Hardison really doesn’t think he’s broken. He was raised right, had food on the table, no one abused him, no one took his family away, no one hit him for being smart.  Sure, he didn’t have the traditional family, but his nana was there for him, as she was for every child that came through her door.  So he vows that in his adult life that he’ll protect what is his.  This team is his.

He’ll protect Eliot from ones that would seek revenge.  He’ll protect Parker from the bad people that want to hurt her.  He’ll protect Sophie from her aliases coming back to haunt her.  He’ll protect Nate from himself, if he can.  They are all so broken.  He wishes he could figure out how to fix them, make them feel better about themselves. 

The only thing he ever wished for was a family, a stable, honest to goodness, family. Now he has one:  a brother to share and fight with; an older sister, one who guides him and makes him feel special; a father, who is proud of him; and finally, a possible girlfriend, who would love him for what he is.  That’s not why he joined this group, but it’s why he stays.

His friends are broken.  It’s his job to glue them back together, piece by piece, and to make it hold.

 

They’re all so beautiful, Parker thought.  Hardison with his smiles and sarcastic comments; Eliot with his growls and flowing hair; Sophie with her advice and cheerleading; Nate with his mind and his comfort when things go wrong.  Parker never thinks of herself as beautiful.  She is gangly, all limbs, slender. No one has ever called her beautiful, until her team came along.

Everyone has called her broken though.  Even the team sometimes does.  It doesn’t bother her because it’s the truth.  She is broken in ways that she never thought possible.  Relating to normal people, the ability to hold a conversation, saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.  While all the others could operate in the real world, Parker only manages to get through the day without ruining something, like a con or a friendship.  At least she couldn’t push them away with a wrong word said.  They only laugh or tell her to do better next time, but they never would say she has to leave.

Foster parents never had time to help her live in the real world.  Archie had taught her to steal, but not to ask for help.  Once meeting these four people, they have the time to help her.  She has backup.  She has friends to go to dinner with.  She has a team that would hug her.  She has a family to rely upon when she is down. 

But they are broken too.  Eliot has grown up normal, but has seen and done too much.  He thinks the shattered pieces could never be put back together.  Hardison looks to be normal, but craves a family, craves friends because he really didn’t have these growing up.  Sophie craves attention because of some issues early on in her life that she would not discuss with anyone. Nate, well Nate, is probably the most broken of them all, even Eliot.  Crappy father to deal with.  Then he picks himself back up to be slapped back down with his son dying.  Every time he seems normal, the world takes it away.  He would expect to start living, to only have it crash down around his ears.  So yeah, they are all broken, if just a little.

Every day, they come in, talk, plan, look to the next day.  Parker just wants to get through the next hour, the next minute at the beginning of their partnership.  Then she starts to see that she’s gained a family.  Sure, they are broken, but with each other, they are one.  Each piece fit to the other piece to make one whole piece.  Sure, sometimes the pieces struggle to fit, like when Eliot has all the trouble with Moreau or when Sophie has to leave to find herself.  Those pieces get out of alignment.  They slide back in perfectly though, just like Parker thinks they would.

 

Eliot gets up each day wondering which teammate would show their broken side first.  Would it be Hardison and his neediness?  Sure, he’s actually had a nana, but he needs people and friends, much of what he didn’t have while growing up.  Would it be Parker and her craziness?  She hides when things go wrong, and then he has to go and find her and bring her back.  Would it be Sophie and her need for attention?  She tries to be everything to the team.  She disappears into roles sometimes where Eliot thinks he has to pull her out.  It is the need to fulfill a role that none of the others could do.  Her need for the world as a stage sometimes makes them furious, but in the end, she completes each of them, makes them whole. Would it be Nate and his need to self-destruct?  Nate’s the hardest of all to figure out. The planning that goes on in his head sometimes makes it difficult to plan for contingencies, to get the team out if there is danger.  Nate always takes it upon himself when things go wrong to fix it. And things go wrong all the time.  Sure, there are always at least five plans in place.  But the one time that there isn’t, Nate takes the fall, hard. He breaks, shatters into a million pieces right in front of them. 

That is Eliot’s job:  protect the team from the outside world and from themselves.  He couldn’t protect Parker from the shyster and his reading of her.  He couldn’t protect Hardison from his horrible conning skills.  He couldn’t protect Sophie from all her aliases and figuring out which one she wants to be.  He couldn’t protect Nate from his downward spiral. It kills him inside sometimes.  But one thing it doesn’t do is break him even more.  He is needed.  That’s all he wants.

His job is putting each piece back together every day for each of them.  If it just means arguing with Hardison to make him feel like he is a part of a family, he does it.  If it means that he makes sure that Parker doesn’t jump off a twenty story building without a harness, he does it.  If it means that he makes sure that Sophie is safe from the world, he does it.  If it means that he takes the fall or puts himself in harm’s way for one of Nate’s schemes, he does it. 

 

Sophie shivers sometimes when she watches them work together, drink together, share time together.  They are all so beautiful in their own way, but so utterly broken it takes her breath away as she watches.  Like knows like though, which is why she is so attracted to them in the first place.  Eliot with his hair, which hides away his emotions; Hardison and his jokes that hides away his neediness; Parker and her quirkiness that hides away her pain; and Nate and his need to control the world when everything that he ever had is taken from him. This is her team.  They are all so broken, so beautifully broken.

They all wear their brokenness on their faces.  No one else can tell.  It is a gift that Sophie has.  She can tell when they have a bad day, bad night.  Eliot doesn’t look at them, swinging his hair in front of his face.  His eyes look haunted, like he has some dream that takes him back to the days where he is a bad man, doing things that he never thinks he would ever do.  When Parker has a bad day, she sits in silence, face blank, eyes slightly narrowed.  She never sees Parker cry, unless it is serious, but she knows when Parker has a bad night.  Her body slumps ever so slightly, her hands fidget with whatever she can find whether it is a pencil, a piece of paper or a lock.  Hardison attempts to be cheery and fails.  He fidgets also, but his eyes droop, his smile is false and his body seems inches shorter.  It is almost like he is a caricature of himself some days.  And Nate, she can read like a book.  He is most damaged looking of all of them.  His bloodshot eyes, the smell of alcohol, the hair every which way.  She knows when he has a bad night.  All the others try to hide it; Nate’s always is there for the world to see.  No matter how many times she empties the bottles in his apartment, he fills them back up.  No matter how many times she tries to get him to talk to her, he just goes off by himself to suffer.

That’s why the team needs her, to mend their brokenness every day.  They all seem to look to her for comfort, even when she doesn’t have anything else to give them.  She does it though, because they are her family.  She does it until she can give no more, even when she’s given herself over to them too many times to count.  That’s why she left them, for a brief time.  She needs to find herself again, even if it is with them the whole time. She needs to realize this for herself.  She needs them, they need her.  Even if Nate can’t say that he needs her, she knows deep down that he does.  The rest of the team has said it too many times to count.  Once he says it though, then that is the incentive that she needs to hear. 

 

Nate is so broken, sometimes he doesn’t know if it’s worth getting out of bed in the morning.  There are four people that depend on him though, so it happens.  That doesn’t mean he likes it and he ends up with a cup full of coffee and whiskey, but he does it.  They need him.

Hardison needs the challenge, the focus that Nate provides him.  Before joining the group, Hardison doesn’t understand that what he does is wrong.  It’s all about the fun and attempting to fill the need of him being alone.  Nate provides that structure to him.

Eliot needs for someone to tell him he’s worth it, not broken beyond repair.  At first, Eliot does not see that at all. Gradually, he figures out that if he’s not around, the team goes down.  Nate provides him with purpose.

Parker needs people.  She needs structure, sure, but she needs to learn how to operate around real people.  The team provides her with that and more.  She also needs a family, just like Hardison does.  That’s something she’s never had in her life.  It smooths out the brokenness in her heart and mind, if just a bit.

Sophie needs a challenge, needs a family, needs structure.  But most of all, she needs him.  He provides her with all these things so that she can function, not feel the need to disappear into someone else’s life like she has plenty of times in her life.  She can take on a persona and strip it away in a few days’ time.

What they provide for Nate though if purpose, almost like Eliot, but not quite.  He flounders for two years, drinking his way to oblivion.  They pull him out, set him straight, and make him believe that he can make a difference.  Sure, they see him as broken, but not enough where they will give up on him.  Everyone else has, but they don’t, even though he makes more mistakes than he ever thinks possible.

This team makes him a better man, person, human.  Nate never thought that this could be possible.  When he attempts to deaden the pain with alcohol, they tell him he can’t, pull him up, put him back together.  It can’t be easy for any of them, especially Sophie.  Life eats away at him less and less when he’s with the team.  They are now his reason for living, his brokenness not as sharp, edges dulled if just a bit.

 

They are broken.  They all are broken.  Some more than others, some show it more than others.  But they all need each other, to hold it together, to make it through the next day, the next month, the next job.  And until the pieces are mended, then they’ll keep holding each other together.


End file.
